<
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/14/the-big-idea-will-sci-fi-end-up-destroying-the-world>
"One can only imagine the horror the late Iain Banks would have felt on
learning his legendary
Culture series is a favourite of Elon Musk. The
Scottish author was an outspoken socialist who could never understand why
rightwing fans liked novels that were so obviously an attack on their
worldview.
But that hasn’t stopped Musk, whose Neuralink company – which develops
implantable brain-to-computer interfaces – was directly inspired by Banks’s
concept of “neural lace”. The barges used by SpaceX to land their booster
rockets are all named after spaceships from the
Culture books.
Musk’s entire career stems from trying to replicate sci-fi novels. His desire
to colonise Mars was sparked by the
Foundation novels of Isaac Asimov
(another staunch leftwinger). Tesla’s Cybertruck is something that – in Musk’s
words – “Bladerunner [sic] would have driven”. And it’s true that if you want
to imagine you’re living in a bleak hellscape, a Cybertruck would work well.
His AI tool Grok is named after the Martian word for “understand” in Robert
Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land, and its tone is apparently based on
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m sure Douglas Adams – who wrote with
an anti-apartheid sticker on his typewriter – wouldn’t have been thrilled with
the association, either.
Musk isn’t alone in his enthusiasms. Mark Zuckerberg has renamed his company
and sunk $100bn in pursuit of the “metaverse”, a word that first appeared in
Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel
Snow Crash. So obsessed is Zuckerberg with the
book – in which people plug into a simulated world to avoid a real one fallen
into dystopian chaos – that at one point all product managers at Facebook were
asked to read it as part of their training.
Snow Crash also inspired the
development of Google Earth, and was mandatory reading for the Xbox development
team at Microsoft. Jeff Bezos loves Stephenson so much that he hired him to
work for his Blue Origin rocket company.
If sci-fi’s influence was simply on product design, it wouldn’t be a problem.
If Zuckerberg wants to burn his own cash in pursuit of a personal fantasy, or
Musk wants to build hideous cars, that’s their call. It may even inspire
something genuinely useful from time to time.
The real issue is that sci-fi hasn’t just infused the tech moguls’ commercial
ideas but also their warped understanding of society and politics. The dominant
genre of sci-fi in the 80s and 90s, when today’s Silicon Valley overlords were
growing up, was Cyberpunk – as exemplified in the novels of William Gibson (who
invented the term “cyberspace”) and Stephenson, as well as any number of films
and video games. The grandfather of the genre was Philip K Dick, whose novels
and short stories spawned films including
Blade Runner,
Total Recall and
Minority Report."
Via Susasn ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
